Always enthusiastic about life's possibilities, Abe began a pastime of running at age 80.
What began as a pastime soon became an obsession.
But for one man, what began as a pastime ultimately became a passion and a primary occupation.
In 1969, the poet and translator Robert Phelps sent him a fan's note after reading "A Sport and a Pastime," and they began a close friendship, sending adoring letters back and forth, until Phelps died, in 1989.
In light of the growth in recreational fishing in this improved river, the state environmental agency on March 1 began a yearlong survey of this pastime.
Soccer was just beginning to be more than a pastime of the urban élite, and the new club's founders took the name of a British team that had recently toured Brazil and handily beaten its aristocrats.
Bush, 67, explained to Leno that the artistic streak began after reading "Painting as a Pastime," an essay by Winston Churchill, who himself produced several portraits and landscape pieces.
Bamboo painting is 9 centuries old, began as a scholars' pastime, and is the closest of all categories of Chinese painting to calligraphy.
What began as a harmless pastime has evolved into something more serious with the arrival of full-time 'pro-peepers' whose journey starts in eastern Canada in September and follows the changing foliage south, culminating in the Carolinas and Georgia around late October.
Law school, too, began as another pastime — "It was just for kicks," he said.
During China's economic reforms of the early 1980s, Xiangtan began turning the pastime into profit, and these days processes more than 700 tons each year, according to the Hunan Binglang Association.
